Everybody Comes to Pooja's
by blacktop
Summary: Brief vignettes form a character study of Reese: making a life, however far from normal, is the most difficult mission of all. Includes all major POI characters. Enjoy the ride and please leave a review.


**Everybody Comes to Pooja's: Vignettes from a Restaurant**

_These scenes are not presented in strictly chronological order._

**Spy Games**

The rules of the game were simple, according to Reese: every night he spent in his room above Pooja's, he expected a report from the four grandchildren of his landlady, Mrs. Soni.

Accordingly, three or four times a week, after he finished a quick dinner alone, he came downstairs to the main room of the restaurant and took his usual seat at a booth in the back. The four little assets would line up at the table and formal reporting would begin with the youngest, Hari. The boy, only five years old, would give an account of any stranger that had passed in front of the restaurant more than once in the afternoon during his watch.

Neither the loitering local teen thug, nor the tireless Mr. Lee depositing his packages of laundry, nor the pizza delivery man's eternal transit through the neighborhood counted for these purposes. Only the strangers, Reese insisted. Although he did think it was important to keep track of the movements of the regulars on the block too, so that any future anomalies could be detected.

Hari's round-faced older sister Leena would then describe the suspect's physical attributes using the techniques Reese had taught them. She would pull from the kitchen the bus boy or waiter whose height and girth most closely matched that of the suspect. This method was much more accurate, Reese found, than expecting children to give precise measurements in feet, inches, and pounds.

Hari and Leena, preening performers as most children are, would mimic the gait and posture of the suspect, leaning to the left or right, head thrown back or shoulders hunched, hips swaying or foot dragging as required. Twitches of hands or eyelids were a particular specialty of the sensitive Leena. If she skipped a theater career, the stage would lose a consummate actor, Reese decided.

Under close questioning, the older girls Avani and Bijal, already talented spooks after only a few months of practice, supplied the description of the target. Dress style, hair arrangement, make-up, and accessories carried by the suspicious passers-by emerged from their sharp-eyed and relentless analysis.

They noted umbrellas, handbags, backpacks, logo jackets, hats, shoes, and gloves of each target with the ruthless attention to detail worthy of a spy or a fashion editor.

Reese made meticulous notes on the intelligence gathered by his operatives in a large diary bound in dark blue leather. At the end of the day's report he had each child sign her name (or make his mark) at the bottom of the paragraph next to the date.

And he had plans for his protégés' future development.

All four children could easily be taught to distinguish the basic categories of perfumes worn by a restaurant patron who aroused their suspicions. Women might change their hair color or lipstick or wardrobe, but they kept to a signature fragrance come hell or high water, he had learned.

He would stop by the florist on the corner to buy roses and swipe green fern leaves and moss for his classroom experiment. And he could appropriate cloves, cinnamon, ginger, oranges and lemons from the chef's supplies. The musk he needed would be harder to come by, but he had already spotted the mortar and pestle in the kitchen which he would use to crush his concoctions. Presented in separate glass bowls he expected to quickly train his blindfolded pupils to identify the distinctive scents of floral, green, spicy, citrus, and woody aromas.

Next in his advanced curriculum, Reese planned on teaching Bijal to recognize the tell-tale crease of a suit jacket that indicated a gun holstered at the armpit. And the eager Avani would easily learn to identify the subtle catch and pull of trouser fabric that betrayed a knife strapped to the ankle.

Under his careful guidance, he would make these girls into the best damned spies in the world.

**Surveillance/Overlook 2.0**

Fusco was pretty good at tailing, Reese was relieved to discover.

There wouldn't be much point in having the dirty cop undercover inside HR rat's nest, if he didn't have the basic skills of the trade.

So when Reese found himself being followed by Fusco one day, he made the most of the entertainment value of the exercise.

He kept his pace slow in deference to the older man's weight and general out-of-condition condition. His goal was to arrive at Pooja's well ahead of the planned dinner, but there was still plenty of time to kill before then.

So he breezed down avenue after avenue, parting the huddled crowds of women and men, who were all either overheated from their subway rides or frigid in the sharp winter glare. He generally avoided physical contact whenever he could. But on a busy street, Reese found it occasionally useful to abruptly bump shoulders with an on-coming pedestrian.

The abrasive gesture was subconsciously noted by those around him and they gave him wider berth afterwards. He had found out long ago that fear was a useful tool in controlling even strangers.

It amused Reese to see Fusco pull himself up short to avoid being spotted when Reese stopped suddenly at an ATM. He didn't need money, but the reflective surface of the machine provided an easy way to witness Fusco's momentary panic as he sought cover by studying the volumes displayed in the window of a mystery and fantasy book store across the street.

Two blocks later Reese paused at a corner and looked up at the traffic camera overhead. He smirked directly into the lens as if communicating with an unseen ally, which he knew would keep Fusco perplexed for hours.

The concentric circles he was drawing around Pooja's were getting progressively smaller as Reese approached his evening's target.

He flipped out his phone so that Fusco could see him clearly. He called Carter just to harass her at the precinct and to hear her exasperated voice as she tried to wrap up her desk work for the day. She never sounded exactly glad to speak with him, but neither did she sound like she hated it either, so he kept at it. He had long since forgotten how to do anything by half measures.

His walking and Fusco's stalking was good mindless fun and most importantly it kept his thoughts from rambling into dangerous territory. He didn't think the dinner at Pooja's was a date exactly; in fact he was sure it wasn't, as far as Carter was concerned. She had agreed too easily to come back to the restaurant where they had enjoyed such a wonderful meal three weeks previously.

Her tone was matter-of-fact, casual even, which annoyed him. She should have argued, demanded a plausible reason or at least an excuse to meet for dinner instead of on the usual park bench. But she didn't, which introduced a mystery he felt incapable of solving for the time being.

Even though dinner was just ahead, Reese was hungry and he bet Fusco was too. He stopped at a Korean grocery with the intention of picking up an apple and a bottle of water. But the skinny kid pulling a stick-up had other ideas.

Reese chased the kid from the store catching, out of the corner of his eye, the detective hovering under the awning at the entrance of a nail shop opposite. The kid led Reese on a slow-motion run for five blocks, turning at last into an alley behind an Oriental rug store.

There Reese subdued the punk but not without taking several good shots to the brow and chin. The kid was wiry and threw a pretty decent punch for his weight. Reese used one of the hand-cuff sets he had lifted from Carter's car to restrain the perp and emptied his pockets of the cash and chips he had stolen from the Korean grocer.

He left the kid's Yankees blue satin jacket in the garbage pail for Fusco to find along with one of his phones. The lowly Mets were his team, now that he was under the influence of Mrs. Soni. And he didn't want Finch to have access to him tonight.

After returning the stolen cash to the grateful grocer and his jabbering wife, Reese sped directly to Pooja's. He entered through the front door of the restaurant, greeted Anil at the maître d's podium, and went up to his third floor room to shower and change.

He assumed Fusco had been able to tail him as far as Pooja's. And he found, oddly enough, that he didn't mind.

This was where he lived now. And though he still wanted to guard his privacy, he realized he didn't mind if his friend found out this much about him.

An hour later, when Carter walked into the restaurant in a beautiful yellow dress, Reese was stunned.

And grateful that he had succeeded a week earlier in negotiating with Mrs. Soni to modify the terms of his rental arrangement at Pooja's.

**Avani**

For most children the kitchen of a busy restaurant would not be an ideal place to play.

The hard surfaces, urgent ruckus, and knife-wielding danger might appeal to an adventurous boy, but hardly provided a suitable landing for a studious girl, her daredevil sister, and her baby cousins.

Avani knew that the kitchen of her grandmother's restaurant was not a good place to play or study, but since she had no choice she made the best of it.

Her father worked as the head waiter, he liked to say _major-domo_, of Pooja's Restaurant. He went to the kitchen early each morning to gather the other waiters, to make them sign in, stand in a line and count off in big voices that could be heard echoing around the metal decked room.

Some times Avani and her sister Bijal came with him to the restaurant before going to school. This happened on mornings when her mother had to go early to her job as a bank teller and couldn't drop off the girls at school.

Those were the best mornings. Avani enjoyed watching her tall handsome father, always in suit and tie, speaking to each of the waiters and busboys as they reported for work. Her father, Anil, was the second son of her grandmother, but he had the most responsibility in the restaurant. His older brother, Uncle Anand ran the cooking operation, keeping the under chefs in line and purchasing all the food for each day's meals. The third brother, Uncle Vinay, was in charge of the money and he sat all day at a desk in the small office next to the kitchen, typing numbers into a computer.

The grownups worked hard at Pooja's and so did she.

Since she was the oldest grandchild, Avani had the most responsibility. Her job was to keep the younger children safe, to make sure they did not interfere with the smooth work of the kitchen or bother the customers when they came in for lunch or dinner. It was easy enough to keep her cousins in line most of the time. They were barely past babyhood and a sharp word was all it took to remind Leena and Hari to mind their manners. Bijal the mischievous was another thing. Avani despaired of keeping her sister from teasing the bus boys or sneaking out to look at the customers or hiding the chefs' knives or shouting dramatically in the dining room.

Every afternoon Avani and Bijal would walk the four blocks from their school to Pooja's Restaurant. The girls would sit at a small table in one corner of the kitchen, with their workbooks and pencils spread out in front of them. They would try to finish their homework before the dinner rush began because the loud clanging noises of the kitchen then became too much.

If they finished their homework early, their grandmother would bring them books to read from her upstairs parlor. Avani especially liked the big green leather bound book of _Grimm's Fairy_ _Tales_ and she enjoyed reading the stories to her sister to keep her settled at the table. No matter how often they begged, their grandmother would not let them watch television upstairs by themselves even when the younger children arrived in the early evening.

Most nights the children were allowed to watch a baseball game or a basketball game with their parents and grandmother in the upstairs parlor. The chatter of the grownups about their gossip and business deals mixed with the pleasant droning of the game to make these late evenings so wonderful, in Avani's view.

And on the best nights of all, Avani, Bijal and their cousins were invited to sleep over at Pooja's. Their grandmother would let the children sleep together in a tangle in the large bed in the spare room on the third floor. As she drifted to sleep, Avani liked to watch the sweep of the arms of the fan overhead as it whirled around, stirring the curtains at the window. Her sister and cousins' bodies felt warm and sticky and comfortable pressed against her under the covers.

The mornings after their sleep-overs, Avani would help her grandmother prepare wonderful fancy breakfasts of foods and drinks their parents never served at home. Avani loved staying at Pooja's.

The arrival of the tall man with the icy eyes changed their routine.

After he started living in the third floor room, the children had to sleep on narrow cots their grandmother would set up in her parlor. Avani didn't mind this new arrangement so much because she got to sleep alone on the big soft yellow sofa among the flowers and vines. But she very much did mind that they had to keep extra quiet in the mornings, so that they would not wake up the tall man. She didn't see why he wasn't up and out of bed at a normal hour like everybody else.

At night, she could hear him walking around their room - now his room - in bare feet. And she could tell when he sat on their bed - now his bed - by the gentle way it creaked against the wall under his weight.

After a month of this new arrangement, their grandmother introduced the children to the newcomer, Mr. Reese. He didn't smile when they were presented to him, but he did pronounce each of their names carefully and studied their faces as if memorizing them.

Avani decided she would wait to see if she liked him or not. It is hard to tell about grownups at first, she knew. But sometimes just by watching them, they tell a lot.

So Avani planned to watch Mr. Reese to see what sort of man he was and whether there was anything else worth knowing about him besides the firmness of his handshake and the sadness in his pale eyes.

**Mr. Lee**

The package of laundered shirts, habitually delivered by Mr. Lee on Friday mornings, did not arrive as usual.

Reese was miffed, but not worried. He carefully monitored his supply of white shirts and had several set aside for days when he needed to change more than once. So he was covered through the weekend.

But this disruption in his well-regulated domestic universe was definitely unwelcome.

The neat packet, wrapped in smooth brown paper and tied in pale twine, finally arrived on Sunday at mid-afternoon, brought into the restaurant by a disheveled Mr. Lee himself. The sparse wisps of white hair stood up straight on his glistening head and his face had a fine sheen of perspiration whose drips had already made a damp triangle at the neckline of his dingy undershirt.

Reese was sitting in his usual booth at the back of the room and as the crowd of lunch patrons had departed, he could easily overhear Mrs. Soni's remonstrance to Mr. Lee.

"This is not acceptable, Mr. Lee."

She was formidable in her towering anger. Reese was sure he would never deliberately cross her if he could avoid it.

"You know that my tenant counts on you for these shirts. He needs them for his work. I rely on you to deliver high quality laundry service in a timely fashion, Mr. Lee. That is what I pay you for."

"But Mrs. Soni!" The little man was properly cowed, but not utterly defeated yet.

"You don't actually pay me for these shirts, you know. I include them in the price for the table cloths and napkins and aprons I launder for you every week. I throw the shirts in for free. Sort of a kindness between neighbors, O.K?"

"If you want me to take my restaurant business elsewhere, I will do it, Mr. Lee. You are not the only laundry in this borough, you know."

She would do it, Reese was certain.

"O.K., Mrs. Soni, you are right. Never again, O.K."

Conciliatory now, Mrs. Soni gestured toward a square table in the middle of the room and indicated Mr. Lee should join her. The tea was already laid out on the pristine white cloth and gauzy steam floated above the cup she had set aside when he entered her restaurant.

As she poured out a cup for him, Mrs. Soni studied the old man closely.

"What is troubling you, Mr. Lee?"

Her interrogation techniques were models of simplicity and effectiveness, Reese marveled. First bully the subject with threatened anger, then dive in for the kill, softly.

"You do not look well at all."

"Mrs. Soni, you are right, I am not well. My eldest daughter, Lydia, told me two days ago that she was going to marry in three weeks. To a white man."

He paused to let the gravity of the situation sink in.

"She is going to marry a white man, some stranger she says she met at a poetry reading just before Christmas last year."

"Ah, Mr. Lee. I see that this sudden news has vexed you. But you know, this is how young people are these days. They meet people their parents don't know, decide to marry them without proper permission, and then make their own families in a terrific rush."

"That is why I was late with the shirts on Friday. Mrs. Soni. I apologize for my error, O.K."

"Oh, don't worry yourself about that Mr. Lee. What does your wife say about the situation?"

"She says she is as upset as I am."

He paused to take another sip from his cup.

"But you know, Mrs. Soni, I'm not sure. In fact, I lay all the blame for this situation on my wife. It is she who gave me three daughters in the first place, instead of sons. She who raised them with foreign American ways, and let them make up their own rules and follow their own ideas. This is where the disaster came from."

"As I recall, Mr. Lee, it is also your wife who made sure that your daughters were raised to be perfectly bilingual. She encouraged them to do well in school, and taught them beautiful manners, and made sure they understood how to run your business.

"There are no more lovely people on this block than your three daughters, Mr. Lee."

The old man bowed his head to acknowledge the compliment.

"And if I may say, Mr. Lee, your wife is also completely responsible for the beautiful faces and virtuous temperaments of your daughters. Many times I have heard people comment in just this way about the charming Lydia, Lucinda, and Linda."

Reese was sure Mrs. Soni was laying it on a bit thick. He had seen the Lee girls on several occasions and was not overly impressed.

But the father of these paragons seemed mollified. Relieved of some great burden he had carried when he entered the restaurant, Mr. Lee drained his cup of tea. He rose and patted the package of shirts that lay on the table between them.

"O.K., Mrs. Soni. Have a good day. And please give my apologies to your tenant for the delay. He will have his shirts on time this week and every week from now on. I give you my word, O.K."

Well done, Mrs. Soni, Reese thought.

Well done.

**Attachment**

Almost a week had elapsed since his last overnight stay at Pooja's. Reese had found himself on the side of town nearest to his fleabag hotel and, under pressure to stick close to the latest number, he had chosen to sleep a few hours each night at the dive rather than trek back to the restaurant.

So when he finally was able to return to his room above Pooja's, it seemed an especially welcome respite. The number was safe at last, on a plane to another state to start a new life.

Though elated by their success, Finch had looked exhausted, the stains of pale purple under his eyes more pronounced, the stiffness in his neck more evident. Reese wondered if Finch had a place to go where he could escape the numbers, find solace or oblivion even, for an hour or two.

These were questions Reese would not ask the older man just yet, though he was determined to find a way eventually.

But Reese found that just the mere fact that Pooja's existed, the knowing that he could come back here when he wanted to, relieved the relentless ordeal of their work.

He needed Pooja's in a way he had not anticipated when he signed up with Mrs. Soni so many months previously. When he was away from his familiar square room for too long, he grew restless and touchy. He found that even the day's minor irritants could rub his nerves raw when he hadn't slept at Pooja's for a while.

The frantic pursuit of safety and resolution for the number always obscured his own thought processes for the duration of a case. But when, at the end of a case, he paused to think again, the flash of insight into his own desires startled him.

This attachment to such a place, any place really, was unsettling.

But he wanted more.

**Mr. Burdette**

Hari was never wrong in his silent reports.

The little boy's ability to mimic the body language and gait of a surveillance subject was uncanny, Reese had found.

And so, when the evening's report began with Hari's jerking, listing gallop across the floor in front of the booth where the handler reviewed his child agents, Reese knew who had been spotted.

Harold Finch.

Following Hari's performance, Leena produced the busboy Pascal from the kitchen to embody the man they had seen limping back and forth in front of Pooja's that afternoon.

Five foot nine, about one hundred and fifty pounds.

Yes, Finch.

Bijal and Avani described in detail the man's smart suit (cocoa brown with a windowpane plaid in burnt orange) and tie (green figured with a tiny yellow and brown paisley) as well as the coordinating shoes and socks. The ever vigilant Avani assured Reese that the man in question was not carrying a concealed gun or knife.

So Finch had traced Reese back to Pooja's at last.

Reese had anticipated his employer would succeed in tracking him down eventually. He was in fact a little surprised that the first time Fusco tailed him to the restaurant had not resulted in a confrontation earlier.

Maybe Fusco had not given up Reese's location all those months ago.

That man was as surprising an ally as he was smart as a cop.

Reese wasted no time in inviting Finch to dinner at Pooja's. The excuse of making good on a lost bet was enough to get the older man to agree to meet him the following Saturday for an evening out.

Reese debated whether to tell Mrs. Soni anything about Finch but decided to say only that he was bringing his employer to the restaurant for dinner. He was sure that with that prompt, she would go all out for the occasion.

Which she did, offering a sumptuous meal of many courses and glorious variety. The two men ate and ate and talked more freely than they had ever done before.

Reese was pleased to find Finch grow less prickly as the evening progressed, even without the lubricant of alcohol. The man's usual acerbic asides, parenthetical jabs, and brittle word play were discarded in favor of amusing stories and finally reminiscences of people Finch had met in gentler lives before this one. These were obviously people whom Finch missed, whose welfare he wondered about, whose influence he still felt. The presence of these ghostly figures seemed to warm the desperate loneliness of this gifted man. Reese wished he had met them - met Finch - in a time before this borrowed and hectic one they shared now.

"Thank you for inviting me here, John." Finch sounded wistful in a way that Reese found unexpectedly touching.

"You didn't have to do it. I would have respected your privacy, you know."

"I know that, Harold. I wanted to have you here."

Finch hesitated for a moment.

"Has Detective Carter visited Pooja's?"

"Yes, she has." Reese let that hang between them for a long interval.

They drank their fragrant tea in companionable silence, not needing to say more for several minutes.

When Mrs. Soni, resplendent in a rich amber colored sari flecked with golden embroidery, approached their booth at the end of the evening, Reese assumed it was to formally greet his boss and nothing more.

He was wrong.

Mrs. Soni gestured to a waiter who immediately pulled a chair to the booth. She took her place at the head of the table and sat silently while a different waiter brought a tray with three silver bowls of ice cream and three heavy silver spoons. Oscillating her gaze between the two men, she waited while yet another attendant poured steaming water to warm the pot of tea and placed a third cup in front of her.

"Mr. Burdette, welcome to Pooja's Restaurant."

Reese started at the use of that name. He had told her nothing at all about Finch.

"John has told me much about you. I trust that you have enjoyed your dinner here. One that I hope will be the first of many."

"Mrs. Soni, I have definitely enjoyed the dinner. When he invited me here, John assured me this was among the finest Indian restaurants in the city."

Mrs. Soni bowed her head toward Finch.

"And now I have to expand that observation to say that this is truly one of the finest dining establishments in the city. Period."

"Oh, Mr. Burdette, you flatter my little restaurant too much."

Prompted by Finch's questions, Mrs. Soni described in considerable detail how she and her husband had established Pooja's many years ago and how her sons now ran the business under her watchful eye.

"You never can really stop overseeing your businesses, can you, Mr. Burdette?"

The soft gaze she had turned on Finch seemed to harden.

"My cousin, Vijay Gupta, owns one of the largest auditing firms here in the city and from time to time he sends one of his accountants to help out my third son with our books. Simple accounts for a very simple little business, really. But I find it is quite helpful to get Vijay's advice and guidance in these complicated matters. He understands so much about finance and banking and he tells me things that I couldn't possible comprehend on my own. Vijay is so very helpful in explaining it all to me."

During this last speech, Reese was alarmed at the way that Finch's face drained of color. The man looked pasty and slick under the glare of the restaurant's overhead lights.

Mrs. Soni continued her story, brown eyes trained on Finch's milky blue ones.

"You know, Mr. Burdette. Family connections are so useful, I find. Take Vijay for example. I call him my cousin, but really that is only because my grandfather and his great-grandfather came from the same small village in India. We are not actually blood relatives you see, but we look out for each other whenever we can here in New York. The place is so big and confusing that it is pleasant and useful to keep track of those thousand tiny connections which can make it work more smoothly, don't you think?"

"I am sure you are quite right." Finch was mumbling so that Reese had to lean forward in his seat to catch the words.

"Having a wide network of contacts is always helpful to an astute business person such as yourself, Mrs. Soni."

"So true, Mr. Burdette. In fact, just the other day, my cousin invited me to his apartment, a beautiful old flat with a breathtaking view of Central Park, for a dinner with family friends. The meal was not as good as ours here at Pooja's, of course, but as a guest one cannot complain. After the others had departed, Vijay happened to mention an old client whose financial records he had maintained for many years. The accounts of Mr. Peacock - that was his client's name, Mr. Peacock - had recently come under IRS scrutiny and Vijay had to work many weeks of overtime to reconcile the records and cover the numerous discrepancies which arose in those complicated files. I didn't understand it at all - so many names, so many numbers - but it was very pleasant to listen all evening to my cousin chatter on like that.

"He is a very smart man, Mr. Burdette"

"Yes, I'm sure he is, Mrs. Soni." Finch's fingers fidgeted with the hem of the white napkin crumpled on the table.

Reese knew he did not catch all the meaning of this exchange; the contending parties were too subtle for that. But from the tension crackling around the table he knew he needed to end the evening before things got completely out of hand.

This convoluted web spinning by two spymasters in a confined arena was as unnerving as anything he had experienced in years of intelligence work.

He couldn't bear it.

"Mrs. Soni, Mr. Burdette, I can see you want to sit up all night chatting. But I need my beauty sleep. This has been a long week."

Reese slid out from the booth and Finch quickly followed his lead. In turn the men bent over their hostess' hand and thanked her again for the lovely evening.

"Instructive," was the sole word Finch uttered as he clambered into the back seat of the limousine parked outside the restaurant.

Reese remained on the sidewalk in front of Pooja's luminous picture window and watched the dark car glide away into the shadows.

The lights inside the restaurant went dark then and the square of gold he had been standing on disappeared.

**Negotiations**

The house rules were easy enough to follow. Until he wanted to change them.

Mrs. Soni had restated them several times during the first month of his tenure at Pooja's just to make sure Reese understood: No visitors, no alcohol, no smoking, no women, no outside food.

The food from the restaurant kitchen was more than adequate; he had no visitors, didn't smoke, and could get drunk at his fleabag hotel when he wanted to.

"I need to re-negotiate the terms of my lease, Mrs. Soni."

"You want to have someone else do your laundry? Mr. Lee's work is no longer satisfactory?"

"No, Mrs. Soni. I'm fine with Mr. Lee's work. My shirts are whiter than white. I could do a TV commercial for him."

"You want to have three meals a day, instead of two?"

"You know I don't even usually eat the two that I get now. So, no that isn't it."

"You want your towels and sheets changed on Tuesdays instead of Thursday?"

"No, Mrs. Soni, that's not it."

He sighed. This was going to be harder than he had anticipated.

"I want to re-negotiate the ban on visitors, alcohol, smoking, and women."

"You want to bring alcohol here, John? You know how I feel about that!

"Or is it the smoking?"

The exasperating woman was determined to drive him over the edge.

Or get a straight answer out of him.

"Don't start again with me, Mrs. Soni."

"Well then, what is it?"

Reese hesitated and was poised to drop the subject altogether.

"I can't read your mind, you know."

"I want to be able to bring women to my room."

"Women? Many women? Frequent women? Or just occasional women?"

She was smirking.

"No, Mrs. Soni. " He sighed again.

"One particular woman. Why are you teasing me like this?"

"Oh, let an old woman have her little pleasures, John! I just like seeing you blush."

She paused to admire her work, raking her eyes up and down his face.

With a huge smile creasing her own, she drove straight to the point.

"So you would like to break my house rules so that you can entertain Detective Carter in your room?"

"Yes."

"I'll have to think about it. I will let you know my decision later."

"When?"

"Later."

She would not be budged. And the evening's conversation ended there.

Reese waited for one week. Then a second week. As the third week began, he realized that there was method behind Mrs. Soni's maddening silence.

She was testing him. She wanted to know if his desire to change the house rules was an impetuous fancy, a passing whim only.

He refused to play her game. He refused to ask again.

He gambled that she would bend under the pressure of her curiosity, or her compassion, or both.

Bend she did.

Mrs. Soni finally caught him late one night as he was half way up the flight of stairs to his room.

She launched directly from the point at which their negotiation had been suspended several weeks prior.

"John, you only spend a few nights a week here. So, unless you sleep on park benches, I assume that you have other flats around the city."

He nodded but refused to give her the satisfaction of a spoken answer until she made her question explicit.

"So you could entertain Detective Carter in one of your other places."

"You're right, I _could_."

It was important to him that she understand this point clearly.

"But I don't _want_ to, Mrs. Soni."

"You choose to bring her here?"

"Yes, I do."

"Thank you, John. Thank you for that."

He was several steps above her on the stairs, but he could see the tears glistening through her black eyelashes.

"Bring her here whenever you wish."

After a brief silence, he spoke to lighten the mood.

"I hope it won't take me as long to convince Detective Carter as it did you, Mrs. Soni. This negotiation was exhausting."

"It won't."

"How do you know that?"

"Don't you realize, John?

"She had made up her mind by the end of her first dinner here at Pooja's."

**Whist**

To improve the focus and attention span of his little operatives, and relieve his own boredom, one rainy weekend afternoon Reese decided to teach the children to play whist.

The card game's simple format and linear rules made it easy for his four young spies to grasp the essentials of play in that single sitting.

Reese reserved to himself the position of dealer so that the game would move more rapidly, although he allowed Avani and Bijal to alternate at shuffling the deck. Five-year old Hari was assigned the permanent role of Dummy, although Reese called it "The Avenger" to keep the little boy happy.

Leena's special charge was to turn over the final card in the pack revealing the trump for the round, a move she performed with great flourish like a magician pulling a rabbit from the hat. The three girls had no difficulty fanning out the thirteen cards in their hands. Hari held the two jokers in a fan shape too, but wasn't allowed to play them although he would occasionally toss one of his cards on the table to interrupt the flow of the game.

On the second evening they played whist, Avani arranged the table so that she sat across from Reese as his partner. Even though the free-wheeling game didn't actually involve partnership, Avani paid close attention to the cards Reese cast and after a few rounds she began purposefully throwing the hands. She played a lower card than his on almost every round, taking a trick only if forced to because she had a handful of trumps or just face cards remaining.

Mrs. Soni encouraged the card play at the back table in her restaurant as a way to keep her boisterous grandchildren and her restless tenant amused and confined to one place where she could watch them all. She brought small silver bowls of almonds or cashews to the game table and took orders for the fruity yoghurt drink, _lassi,_ or milk. Reese might have boosted the challenge of the game by using the nuts as betting chips, but decided against it because Mrs. Soni would object to his teaching the children to gamble.

Avani adored these special evenings and made sure to rush her sister and cousins through their dinner in order to be ready to play if Reese was there.

Bijal was a flamboyant and occasionally reckless player, with the best memory at the table. She was not above reneging, even when the rules forbidding such cheating had been explained to her several times. When Bijal triumphed, legally or illegally, her crowing could not be contained and occasionally led to tears from the other players. Once Leena pulled the cloth off the table in frustration at Bijal's repeated victories, a disaster that resulted in everyone being sent to bed early.

Avani on the other hand, used a quiet and strategic approach, patiently counting her cards, reserving her trumps, keeping a serene expression throughout the match. On the rounds she sat out, Avani stood behind Reese to observe his card choices; frequently she would press against the back of his chair to whisper a suggested course of play. Avani's recommendations invariably resulted in a win, which made her especially proud.

On those evenings when Detective Carter came to the restaurant, she would arrive toward the end of the game and quietly watch the final rounds from a chair behind Hari the Avenger. She would take a few cashews, sip a _lassi,_ and nod in approval of Bijal's daredevil play or Leena's dramatics. No matter who won the game she would applaud loudly.

Avani watched Reese to see if he tried to speed up the game on the nights when the police officer visited, but she could not see that he changed his play at all. In contrast, the children changed a lot. Leena performed for the visitor, mugging through unnecessarily theatrical commentaries as the game unfolded. Bijal vied with Hari for a place on the detective's lap. Coolly scowling, Avani stood apart from this babyish behavior, silently enduring these antics in hopes of prolonging the game.

But these evenings always ended too soon and in the same way: the children shuffled off to their parents' cars for the ride home or stowed in cots in their grandmother's parlor.

After a while, Avani stopped playing whist. She refused to come back to the game table, no matter how much Bijal vowed to limit her cheating or Leena promised to be quieter. Even Hari's offer to let her be the Avenger failed to win her back.

Reese volunteered to teach Avani an advanced variant of the basic game called bid whist, which he said was too complicated for the younger children. He had learned it in the Army, he told her, and he was sure she would be a champion bid whist player in no time.

But Avani resisted his challenge and declined to learn another card game which depended on the participation of the other children.

She told Reese she wanted him to teach her to play chess instead.

He agreed to start the lessons when they could both find the time.

**Wet Work**

He watched Carter push the kidnapper's inert body off of hers.

Reese had done the killing, slicing the man's throat from ear to ear in a single stroke, but some skewed gallantry required him to let her get to her feet unassisted.

The alley where they had tracked down their target was sheltered from the night sky by a delicate scaffolding of rusting fire escape ladders and black window boxes decked with last summer's dead foliage.

Reese heard the cars rush by on the street at the end of the passageway, but a steady drizzle kept pedestrians to a minimum and he was sure no one had seen the three of them enter the blind alley.

The number was safe now, the threat eliminated permanently.

Carter swayed as she stood in front of him, unsteady on her feet even though she had ditched her usual heels to wear black running shoes for the two days of their stakeout.

_Just as high as my heart_. Suddenly she seemed so small and he remembered the description of Rosalind from some long ago Shakespeare class, but knew he would never tell her about the poetry.

Flecks of gore dotted her face and blood splashed across her throat and down under her shirt to her breasts.

The killing was unavoidable, he knew. Reese would have preferred to use a gun, but he could see no sure way to avoid hitting Carter as she grappled with their quarry, so he had bent over the man's back and slit his throat as she held him close.

He pocketed the man's blunt knife and the snubbed-nosed gun he had fired when he launched his attack.

"You have to get out of here." Reese felt the new urgency rise up in him even as the immediate heat of the violent moment subsided.

"We have to take care of the body." She sounded cool and practical, but her eyes were huge and glittering and he knew she was in a certain kind of shock.

"I can handle that. You need to get out of here. Now."

She held out her hands and seemed surprised to see the blood drying there.

"Carter, look at me. You are not hurt, but you have to get out of here. I'll take care of the body. No one will find it."

He pushed her shoulder to start her moving back to the lighted street.

"I can help you." He knew she would have been of some assistance in slinging the man's body into the trunk of the car.

But after that he had no desire for her to witness what he had to do.

"No, you can't. You need to get cleaned up, destroy your clothes. Go to the corner, there's a taxi stand in front of the hotel. Get away from here as quick as you can."

She turned and started walking slowly toward the street, following his command without further argument.

But that wasn't right either.

"Carter, wait. You can't go home. You can't let Taylor see you like this."

She stopped to look down again at her hands and then back into his eyes. He knew she didn't have an exact idea of what her face looked like, but he thought she could guess how bad it was from his expression.

"Here's what you do: Go to Pooja's. Mrs. Soni will let you in. Stay there until I get done. Give me three, four hours. "

"You'll come back there tonight?"

"Go in the back door through the kitchen. It'll be locked by now, but if you knock on the window, Mrs. Soni can hear you. She's usually working late in her office in the kitchen."

The plan was set, she had a direct order, he knew she would follow it. He was satisfied that the immediate danger was over as he watched her stride with new purpose into the glare of the avenue.

Retrieving the blue sedan was quick, stopping at HQ to pick up a satchel of chemical supplies, a hammer, saw and shovel was easily done too. Finch was at his keyboard, but a nod from Reese confirmed the success of the mission and eliminated the need for further communication.

Dismembering the body took longer than he had figured. Wiry and dry, the man's supple sinews did not sever easily. Gouging out the teeth was next, then hacking off the fingers and feet, and completing the decapitation begun by the knife blade to the throat. Reese stuffed the parts into four black plastic bags, mixed a dissolving solution, and sat in the car for three hours while the chemicals did their work. During the fourth hour, he dug a pit, emptied the warm slurry from the bags, and filled the hole with earth again.

Then he drove to the fancy flat Finch had rented for him in a sleek building on the Upper East Side to wait for the morning.

The apartment's icy white walls and marble floors amplified the scant moonlight so that Reese didn't need to turn on any of the overheads. To facilitate his vigil, he scooped the grounds and drew the water for a full pot of coffee, enough, he hoped, to see him through the night. He wanted to stay awake and made the brew as dark and bitter as possible.

While the coffee dripped, he unfolded a fifth plastic bag to discard his soiled clothing, keeping only his belt and shoes. He briefly considered running a bath in the extravagantly deep canoe-shaped tub. But the idea of it felt indulgent; crude austerity suited his mood better.

In the shower, with the steaming rivulets flushing the grease and dirt from his body, Reese allowed himself to think at last about Joss.

He imagined that Mrs. Soni had greeted her at the back door of the restaurant. He thought the older woman would let her in without a word, and lead her straight upstairs to his room, stopping only to retrieve fresh towels. Two yellow towels, he was sure.

Joss would pause near his bed to set down the towels and wait for Mrs. Soni to close the door behind her. When she was alone she would take off her stained shirt and slacks with deliberate slowness. She would move slowly to occupy the time with necessary tasks until he arrived.

He saw her, beautiful as always, in her white bra and panties, both crusted now with the dead man's blood, as she approached the mirror in the bathroom to examine her face.

Thinking about that first glimpse of her gore-smeared face made him wince.

He should have found another way to kill the man. It was his duty to protect her from the attack, of course, but also from exposure to the intimate ugliness of this particular death.

His selfishness had brought this pollution down on her. If he hadn't wanted her with him, wanted to talk to her, to see her reactions to his clever tactics, wanted her to admire his weapons and his strength, then this wouldn't have happened.

She was collateral damage he could have prevented.

He thought of her in the shower now, water cascading down her breasts, her stomach, coursing along her thighs.

Maybe she wept, maybe not.

It didn't matter that she had killed before, that she had seen death before. This was a death he thrust upon her, one she didn't deserve to see.

He turned off the torrent of hot water and dried his body, welcoming the brisk irritation of new towels against his back and chest.

When she turned off the water (it would run cold after ten minutes), she would wrap herself in one yellow towel and make a turban of the other. He could picture her small smile when she found that Mrs. Soni had laid out a silver tray with a tea pot, two cups, and a saucer of cookies on the table next to his window.

Chamomile tea for sleep, ginger cookies to settle the stomach. Four cookies he imagined, not crunchy but soft the way he liked them. Joss would eat two and save two for him. Would she blow on the hot tea before she removed the yellow towel or would it slip from her breasts? He could see the muscles of her brown shoulders, still slick with water, flexing and bunching as she reached to pour the tea.

Or would she find a discarded white shirt of his to ward off the chill? He could see her in his shirt, now pushing the cuffs toward her elbows, now stretching her arms up to fasten her hair into a high knot.

She would look for the white silk cloth she kept on the door knob in the bathroom and tie it around her hair. Dampness would mold the white shirt to her breasts, turning the fabric transparent against her skin and outlining the shape of her dark nipples.

He lay down on top of the white silk sheets in the enormous bed and let the fabric chill his body.

She would sit cross legged on his bed, eating the cookies, the shirttails riding up so that her brown thighs were exposed. He could imagine her sex, damp too, pressing against the sheets of his bed as she ate.

His arousal, hard and unwanted, pounded through him like a tidal wave.

Why should he take comfort from these thoughts of her? Why should his body find amusement or relief or oblivion on this polluted night? He didn't deserve the gift she gave him now.

He didn't deserve to be with her at all.

He lay still now, his erection pulsing hard against his stomach, his hands clenched in the white sheets beside his flanks.

He wouldn't let his hands play her role this night.

As his mind scanned the square familiar room, he could picture Joss lying down at last under the covers on his side of their bed.

He could see her turn toward the wall and hug her knees to her stomach. She would wait for him, breathing in his scent from the sheets and from the shirt embracing her.

As he waited for her to fall asleep, his brutal excitement subsided; but the desire, calmed at last, remained constant.

He remembered another line from Rosalind's play:

_And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,_

_And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;_

_And thereby hangs a tale._

Released at last, he let his thoughts drop and drop like rainwater and when the night hours were over, he felt refreshed.

**Wounded**

Most of the time, Reese sustained only minor cuts, bruises, and nicks, defending or defeating the numbers. Firing high powered guns at them kept most assailants too far away to do much direct damage.

He used the first aid kit he kept at headquarters or the more elaborate collection he stored in his bathroom at Pooja's to treat these scratches on his face, hands or arms. The occasional graze from a glancing bullet burned for a while, but he managed to ignore the pain of those incidental wounds. The headaches he treated with aspirin and ice from Mrs. Soni's kitchen.

Reese had always prided himself on his resiliency and his stoicism.

So he was unprepared when the knife wound on his left shoulder turned bad.

For a few days the long gash oozed, then it puckered and festered, then it began to stink. Reese didn't believe the wound was deep; the muscle didn't seem to be affected. But the hot pulsing under his skin and the angry trench of pus demanded expert attention.

He didn't want to go to a clinic or hospital: too many questions and demands for I.D. and insurance proof. So he cleaned the wound as best he could and stayed under the covers in his bed, hoping his body's defenses would do their work.

After a week, fever hit him hard. Mrs. Soni knocked on the door in response to his moans and entered when he didn't immediately ask her in. His glazed eyes, parched lips, and damp forehead told her part of the story, the brown crusted blood on his t-shirt told the rest.

She didn't bother to try to persuade Reese to go to the hospital; his late nights and erratic tenancy had long ago convinced her that his work was dangerous, illegal, and secret. The information about his employer that she had collected from her informal network of contacts confirmed these suspicions.

So Mrs. Soni cut away the filthy shirt, washed his face and chest with cool cloths, covered him with a second blanket, and telephoned Dr. Krishna Patel, who was married to the third great grand-daughter of her oldest sister.

Dr. Patel arrived after the restaurant's dinner service was completed to find his patient groggy and his elderly relative anxious.

Mrs. Soni felt guilty for not knowing how long it had been since Reese had been knifed. She believed he had suffered for at least a week before she discovered him, but neither she nor the doctor could get a coherent response about how he had sustained the injury or when. Mrs. Soni thought of calling his employer, but she decided that if John had chosen to not contact Mr. Finch, or Burdette or Peacock or whoever he was, then she had no right to violate those wishes.

Dr. Patel wanted the patient upright in order to gain better access to the wound. So Mrs. Soni sat behind Reese on the bed, propping him against her as the doctor worked. She preferred this position because she didn't have to see exactly what it was that Dr. Patel did. He spoke softly as he worked so she knew that after inspecting the seeping wound, he cut and drained the infected area, washed it with solution, packed it with a combination of antiseptics, and made over thirty tiny stiches to close the incision.

Dressed in a clean t-shirt and repositioned under the blankets, Reese who had remained silent throughout the operation, sighed and stared directly at Mrs. Soni for a moment before his eyelids fluttered shut. She hoped he was in less pain.

Dr. Patel instructed Mrs. Soni on how to change the dressing on the wound and left her gauze, bandages, tape and antiseptics enough for two changes for each of the following three days. Asking no further questions, the doctor also gave her a prescription, written in her own name, for oral antibiotics and a powerful painkiller.

Mrs. Soni was as good a nurse as she was a cook. She tended to Reese with a precision and regularity that reminded him of the Army. Reese found the whole process vaguely annoying, his sleep punctuated by her regular visits to his room and the clockwork delivery of mild soups and soft delicacies.

On the morning of the third day, Mrs. Soni commanded that he choose between a sponge bath and a shower. He chose the shower, but embarrassingly needed her help to get back into bed after the exhausting exercise. At the end of his visit that evening, Dr. Patel pronounced her a first-rate medical professional and prescribed more bed rest, a recommendation Reese found redundant but irresistible.

As he drifted in and out of sleep, he wondered if Joss had asked about him and if Finch wondered where he was and what Mrs. Soni might have said to put them off.

He wondered how she was able to concoct such bland but delicious meals from a kitchen renowned for its tongue-searing recipes.

He wondered if he would ever get out of bed again.

One evening, he didn't know how long after Dr. Patel's second visit, Reese was awakened by soft whispering voices he identified as belonging to Mrs. Soni and a child. He drifted back to sleep for a long while, to be awakened again by gentle sniffling coming from the overstuffed armchair near his window.

Avani.

Reese focused his gritty eyes on her face, noting the tears staining her cheeks and dripping onto her yellow print dress.

It hurt him to hear her cry like that, for his sake, he supposed.

"Why are you crying, Avani? " His voice sounded harsh and abrupt to his ears, but she smiled a little to find he was awake.

"Grandmother says that you are seriously hurt."

"Well, yes, I was. But now, thanks to her, I am getting better fast."

The girl thought about that for a short while and then burst into a fresh round of crying.

"Now, why are you crying? I told you I am getting better. Or is that what's making you cry?"

He hoped that would sound like a joke to her.

"I am sad because I caused you to get hurt." She looked out of the window, studying the full moon sitting low over the city high rises.

"What in the world makes you think that?" He struggled to arrange pillows behind his back so that he could sit up and look directly at her.

"I caused you to get hurt and I am so sorry now." She repeated her assertion and sobbed.

"You'll have to do better explaining than that, you know."

No answer.

"So, how exactly did you hurt me?"

She gave in.

"I thought I hated you and I wished you got hurt and you did, that's how."

"So you put a curse on me, is that it?"

"Yes."

"Avani, how old are you, ten?"

"Ten and a half years old."

"O.K. Ten and a half. So you know that curses are not possible, don't you?

"You study science in school and you know that just because you hate me you didn't cause me to get stabbed."

"I don't hate you."

"I know."

He closed his eyes again, sank back down into a horizontal position, and they rested silently for several minutes.

He had not quite drifted off again when she piped in a brighter voice:

"Would you like me to read to you as you fall asleep?"

"Yes, I would like that very much."

Avani pulled a large green leather bound book from behind her in the chair and laid it on her lap.

_Grimm's Fairy Tales._

After reading two stories, "The Brave Little Tailor" and "Faithful John," Avani paused to study her patient.

He heard her gather her breath to let out her questions in a rush of words.

"Detective Carter, is she your friend?"

"Yes, she is."

"Does she spy for you?"

"Yes, sometimes."

"Does she read to you?"

"No, she doesn't. You are the only one, Avani."

"Good."

She spoke in the firm no-nonsense tones of her grandmother.

"Then whenever you want a story just call me and I will read to you."

"I will, Avani, thank you.

"I need to sleep now. But I will always remember that you are a good reader.

"And when I want another story, you will be my one and only reader."

At midnight, Mrs. Soni lifted her sleeping granddaughter from the arm chair and let the worn pale man stretched peacefully in bed continue his rest.


End file.
